AGNES W GAMBLE died October 17, 2025 in Cypress, California
She was visiting her daughters Annette and Laurine.
Agnes also celebrated her 101 birthday (about 30 days early). She enjoyed her celebration very much.
However she was weak from choosing to eat and drink too little for a long time. Agnes’s Kidneys had been failing since April and she had heart failure. Her condition rapidly declined over about six days.
Agnes was a widow since 2010; her husband was Dean Gamble. In addition to her two surviving daughters Agnes’ oldest daughter was Beth Lynette Kreiss who died December 2020. Agnes also lost a grandson Michael Maxel in 2008.
Daniel Kreiss, and Aileen Kreiss are her two surviving grandchildren. Their father David Kreiss, husband to Lynette, lives in Valejo with Aileen. Daniel resides in New York.
Agnes valued her I immediate family very much, she also valued her church family at Chapel of the Redwoods in Comptche.
Agnes' memorial service will be held at the Chapel in Comptche at 1:00PM, Saterday November 22, 2025
JED STEELE: The California winemaker behind America’s most popular Chardonnay and the rise of unheralded region dies
by Esther Mobley
California winemaker Jed Steele, who pioneered Lake County’s wine industry, died on Oct. 31 of bladder cancer. He was 80 years old.
His partner Paula Doran confirmed the death.
Steele Wines, along with its offshoot brands Shooting Star, Stymie and Writer’s Block, became the most famous winery in the rural county situated just north of Napa and Sonoma counties. When Steele founded his namesake winery in 1991, he was already a superstar, having spent nine years as the head winemaker for Kendall-Jackson.
“He was Mr. Lake County,” said Napa Valley grapegrower Andy Beckstoffer, who consulted Steele when he bought land in the region in 1997. “He gave Lake County credibility.”
Lake County was better known for pears than grapes in the early ‘90s. Convincing the public that it could produce high-end wines was an uphill battle, but Steele tirelessly promoted the region. He fought against the perception that the county’s climate was too hot and dry for winegrowing, and understood that one of the region’s advantages could be its relative value — he kept his wines largely under $20.
Standing 6’4” and wearing a size 15 shoe, Steele’s presence was substantial. “People always called him the gentle giant,” Doran said. He had a penchant for generous gestures, especially with employees, doling out turkeys in November and Christmas trees in December. Employees’ “newborn babies got scholarships put in their name,” Doran said. He was known for hosting baseball and bowling tournaments for his distributors throughout the country.
After a stroke in 2020, Steele retired, selling his businesses to fellow Lake County vintner Clay Shannon.
Jedediah Tecumseh Steele was born on Jan. 26, 1945 and grew up in San Francisco. His parents became friends with Fred and Eleanor McCrea, who had started a winery on Napa Valley’s Spring Mountain, Stony Hill Vineyard, that was gaining renown for its Chardonnay. Steele attended Gonzaga University on a basketball scholarship.
After graduating, he worked two seasons for his family friends at Stony Hill in 1968 (and lived at the home of another family friend, M.F.K. Fisher), then earned his master’s degree in enology from UC Davis in 1974. Steele spent a decade at Edmeades Winery, itself a pioneer in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. His resume also included stints with Ste. Michelle Wine Estates in Washington, Fess Parker Winery in Santa Barbara County and Cardinale in Napa Valley.
In the early ’80s, Steele took a meeting with Jess Jackson, who was starting a new outfit called Kendall-Jackson, at the Gaslight Grill in Lakeport. Jackson bought an old orchard in Lake County and replanted it with Chardonnay grapes and hired Steele as his winemaker.
The 1982 Chardonnay got stuck near the end of its fermentation; Steele bottled it anyway, leaving in a bit of residual sugar. Before long, the Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve became the country’s best-selling Chardonnay. Nancy Reagan was a famous fan.
Vintner’s Reserve “changed the world,” Beckstoffer said. “That’s a milestone in this business.”
As Kendall-Jackson blew up to around a million cases, Steele began to long for something simpler. His corporate responsibilities left him feeling “more like an air traffic controller than a winemaker,” he told wine writer Dorothy Gaiter in 2018.
“He got to the point in that winery where he wasn’t making wine anymore,” said Doran. He decided to go out on his own, creating Steele Wines in 1991.
The split from Jackson was acrimonious. After initially agreeing to a $400,000 severance plus $10,000 a month while Steele trained a new winemaker, in 1991 Jackson fired Steele as a consultant and stopped the payments, according to the New York Times. Steele sued for the $275,000 he believed he was owed, and Jackson countersued, claiming that Steele had shared trade secrets about how the Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay was made. A Lake County judge ruled in Jackson’s favor.
But that legal battle did not tarnish Steele’s success. He eventually amassed 81 acres of vineyard in Lake County (he also bought fruit from other parts of California). Like the Vintner’s Reserve style that he had established, the Steele wines were known to be fruity and rich, with alcohol levels sometimes crossing the 15% threshold.
“I drank a lot of Steele wines, and they were big,” Beckstoffer said. “He understood what people wanted to drink.”
Steele was the “patriarch” of Lake County’s wine industry, Shannon said, and wanted to see others thrive. When Shannon bought land in Lake County in 1996, “Jed was the big wig up here,” he said. Initially, Shannon was custom-crushing his wines at facilities outside of the county, but Steele offered to do it at his winery instead.
In the late ’90s, Beckstoffer became intrigued by Lake County. Napa fruit was getting expensive, and he wanted to diversify his land holdings with grapes that he could sell to wineries for less. “Everything in Napa was going for $150,” Beckstoffer said. “We needed a $60-$80 Cabernet.” He called Steele, whom he’d met through Jackson, and they took a drive through the area now known as the Red Hills. Steele showed Beckstoffer the potential of the land: soil blown over in long-ago eruptions from nearby Mt. Konocti, studded with little obsidian chips. “Perfect Cabernet ground,” Beckstoffer said. Thanks in large part to Steele’s guidance, he bought more than 4,000 acres.
Steele could never resist tinkering with new labels or grape varieties, planting obscure cultivars like the Austrian Blaufrankisch and eventually expanding to as many as 40 bottlings in a single year. He took pride in his wines’ affordability. “He was never about pomp and circumstance,” said Steele Wines’ longtime bookkeeper Naomi Key. “His wine was great wine, but he’d say, ‘I just make the juice.’”
Even after he sold his winery to Shannon, “he’d still show up every other week,” often with a bottle of Champagne in hand, said Shannon. He enjoyed his retirement, Doran said, spending more time at his homes in Florida and Montana, even as he battled cancer for the last 4 ½ years.
At first, it looked as though Steele Wines would not survive the acquisition. Shannon discontinued the brand, along with Stymie. (He kept Shooting Star and returned the Writer’s Block brand to Steele’s son Quincy.). Recently, however, Shannon has relaunched Steele Wines with a label design from its early days. “I personally like the old retro package,” Shannon said. The wines are $19.99, something Steele would have liked.
Steele is preceded in death by his parents Robert and Frances and his siblings Clelia, Theodora, Johnny and Judy. He is succeeded by his partner Paula Doran, his children Mendocino and Quincy, and his granddaughter Astrid.
(SF Chronicle)
A FIELD OF THEIR OWN: Small district hits pay dirt with outdoor field it couldn’t afford
by John Fensterwald
The Anderson Valley Unified School District this month will cut the ribbon on a $4.7 million — beautiful and new — all-weather track for its junior-senior high school that most small school districts in California can only envy.
Anderson Valley, a 392-student district in Boonville, population 1,650, in Mendocino County, actually couldn’t afford it. But through a grant from an unlikely source, students will be sprinting around the state-of-the-art track enveloping a new grass soccer field.
The school board didn’t ask voters for it as part of the $13 million school construction bond that they passed three years ago. There were — and are — more pressing needs, like removing lead paint, repairing windows that wouldn’t prop open, replacing a broken pipe that leaked raw sewage onto school grounds, fixing dry rot, and modernizing the high school science lab. The bond so far has renovated seven classrooms that hadn’t been touched since the 1950s and the elementary school cafeteria.
“In other words, stretching dollars to update infrastructure in terrible shape,” said Superintendent Kristin Larson Balliet. Because of the state’s tax cap on raising taxes for school bonds, which hampers communities with low-assessed property values like Boonville, the district must spread out the bond drawdown over the years to complete the work.
Anderson Valley’s existing track was also in poor shape. Balliet described it as a “lumpy, dirt thing” surrounding a soccer field that the gophers had turned into a minefield for injuries. “Nobody should have to play on that,” she said.
And so Louise Simson, Balliet’s predecessor as superintendent until last year, discovered the California Department of Transportation’s Clean California Local Grant Program. The district’s project qualified as a community fitness opportunity for the community at large. Four out of 5 students are from first-generation, low-income families, many of whom tend the vineyards that Anderson Valley is known for.
“It was an amazing stroke of luck,” said Simson.
Along with providing “safe and equitable sporting events for high-poverty youth” at the school, it will be “most importantly a place for all residents to achieve their individual wellness and recreation goals, since there are no gyms or workout facilities within a 20-mile radius,” Caltrans wrote in the grant summary.
“The new track and field will transform the community, where adult soccer is king,” said Simson. “And it will be a huge equity factor for kids who visit schools like Mendocino High, where they see amazing facilities.”
Now, they will have a field of their own, said Balliet. “It will bring pride to the school; it will be important to the kids.”
Simson recently confided in a letter to her former staff that “every day before that grant was awarded, I prayed on that field because I truly believe that all kids deserve a shot.”
She has been invited back to her former school for the celebration on Nov. 21.
(edsource.org)
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